LITMIR.BIZ

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it. Argentina had not passed through the disruptions of prolonged war or anticolonial struggle; it had no serious ethnic, racial, or religious divisions; nor was it experiencing a particularly difficult economic conjuncture when the state terrorism occurred. Neither was it animated by a struggle over scarce resources such as land or aggravated by famine.¹⁷ Argentina was no stranger to military rule, but the turn to state terrorism was unprecedented, an apparent aberration in the military’s culture and certainly that of the country generally. The violence of the 1970s therefore cannot be traced to some intrinsic national ethos, or Argentina’s societal complexion, or an episodic cataclysm. The dirty war’s explanation lies in the realm of history, of deep, unresolved conflicts of some kind. This book seeks to explain precisely which ones, at least in one particular place.

      Argentina’s dirty war, of course, forms part of the larger story of the global Cold War. Washington trained and financed repressive military governments throughout the hemisphere, and indeed Latin America provided a “workshop” of theories and practices applied elsewhere in the world by the United States before, during, and after its confrontation with the socialist bloc.¹⁸ The dirty war, however, cannot be reduced simply to Cold War dynamics, and indeed the Cold War in Latin America revealed a great diversity of influences, tactics, and methods. Too often the story has been told as a simple imposition of American power, with the Latin American militaries as passive recipients of its indoctrination and training, overlooking the precise national contexts in which the violence occurred and the independent agency of the perpetrators of its crimes.¹⁹ In Argentina, the clandestine state terrorism with its death camps, black market in children, and bureaucratic-juridical scaffolding differed greatly from the more conventional counterinsurgency tactics implemented in Southeast Asia and even the Central American monte. Its ideological underpinnings were similarly an amalgam of influences, drawn from Argentina’s history and the military’s own institutional culture as well as diverse foreign sources.

      I have long wanted to write this book. In the mid-1980s, while conducting dissertation research on a previous period in Córdoba’s history, I heard many accounts of the recent experience of life under terror there. In many ways, with dictatorship having just ended, memories were fresher and the need to engage in reflection on that experience far greater than the period I was actually studying, which the traumatic experience of dictatorship almost seemed to have erased. These were the very days of the discovery of the first mass gravesites of the desaparecidos, of the Alfonsín government’s trials of the fallen junta, of a furious, seditious military that staged several unsuccessful military rebellions against that same government. Unfolding events such as these were not yet the subject of history. Now, more than three decades later, they certainly seem to be.

1

       THREATS

      Apostles of the New Order

       To combat day and night until annihilating these subversive criminals who want to subjugate the still standing Argentina to the bloody dictates of foreign regimes.

      —GENERAL LUCIANO BENJAMÍN MENÉNDEZ

      The military government that assumed power on March 24, 1976, did so with a determination to both transform the country and neutralize, indeed to annihilate, those who, so they believed, held radical agendas of their own that threatened Argentina’s sovereignty and its national traditions, its cultural identity. A brutal dictatorship emerged in response to years of social mobilization and popular protest, but even more menacing, also of a Left confident of its ascendance within the working class, influential if not dominant in the new youth culture, and prepared to employ extreme measures to fashion a new society.¹ Antonius Robben has characterized the military’s violence and the state terrorism of these years as a “cultural war,” a war on an ensemble of ideas, beliefs, and ideologies that the military, forged in its own culture of integralista Catholic nationalism, found repugnant and destructive. The dirty war was certainly partly a cultural war, but it was also much more. The threats operated on levels beyond the ideational and eventual, were immediate, visible, and present in multiple sites. The armed Left encroached on the military’s monopoly of violence and therefore threatened its institutional integrity. The Catholic Church posed another threat, a Church wracked by internal rifts caused by the Left’s ascendance and in its growing influence in social spaces formerly the sole preserve of the secular Left. Working-class militancy in the workplace and outside of it threatened powerful business interests and Argentine capitalism itself. A revolution of the kind the Left envisioned jeopardized Argentina’s international alliances and the web of interests tied to those alliances, everything from its links to international financial institutions to those strictly related to hemispheric defense.²

      Political violence in Córdoba, even state-sanctioned terrorism, did not begin with the 1976 coup and the military government that followed. It had occurred periodically in the city since the establishment of the dictatorship of Gen. Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966, flaring up especially in moments of social protest and labor agitation, and became endemic in the final years of the 1973–76 Peronist government. Its perpetrators were the military, police, union thugs, and paramilitary organizations with shadowy links to the security forces, governments, and local business groups. The infamous right-wing death squads of Peronist government minister José López Rega, the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA), independent of the army and targeting largely enemies within the Peronist movement, had less influence in Córdoba than a paramilitary organization, the Comando Libertadores de América, under the army’s direct command and targeting the entire Left, Peronist and otherwise.

      Violence, however, had not been a monopoly of the Right. The Left had practiced it as well, though violence of a different character and certainly with other objectives. Particularly after the 1969 Cordobazo, a massive social protest against the Onganía dictatorship, various leftist organizations had accepted violent tactics including armed struggle and targeted assassinations as legitimate responses to right-wing provocations as well as part of a broad revolutionary strategy. Virtually every leftist organization with a presence in Córdoba, with the exception of the Communist Party, had sanctioned it to some degree. Sympathy for violence as an appropriate, even necessary response to class inequalities, dictatorship, and censorship also flourished among the university students and within the youth culture generally. In Córdoba, perhaps as in nowhere else in Argentina given its large university student population, “la juventud” was a sociopolitical and cultural category, not simply a biological stage. To be young in these years meant much more than nonconformist, even rebellious behavior. It meant embracing a new ethic and assuming the cost of a new political activism, including the possibility of violent death, one’s own and that of another.³

      Though the leftist influences in the city’s youth culture were manifested in other sites, in working-class neighborhoods and in the factories among others, it was above all in the university where revolutionary ideas and the sanctioning of violence flourished. Córdoba’s large public university, the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, was not only the country’s oldest university but also the most politicized. Drawing on its history as the site of the historic 1918 university reform movement, the university had occupied a central place in Córdoba’s civic life in subsequent decades. During the government of Juan Domingo Perón (1946–55), Córdoba’s overwhelmingly Catholic and then largely middle-class student body had comprised a bulwark of opposition to the regime. After Perón’s fall, the country’s entire public university system experienced a thorough revamping. The first expression of such reform was the recovery of university autonomy, an academic independence greatly compromised during Perón’s government. The purging of Peronist faculty and administrators was itself a highly political act and did not respond to purely academic criteria as claimed by the new public authorities, nor did the return of faculty forced to abandon the university during the Perón years always represent a triumph of academic qualifications over political sympathies.⁴ The ten years that followed witnessed large student mobilizations to protest university policies as well as a growing radicalization as the Cuban Revolution penetrated deep into student identity and reformist ideas ceded to revolutionary solutions.

      The subsequent decade would prove tumultuous. Nationally, this new stage was inaugurated by an ominous event:

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